Racial Formation Essay

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sense” (59), where we can comprehend and explain the relationships and workings of the world. This attempt to explain their definition of race, this racial project, leads to the claim that racism is complex and difficult to understand, starting first with the argument that racism is neither “biological” nor an “illusion”.
It was in the 18th and 19th century that many scholars dedicated themselves to trying to identify and rank humankind. Back then, race was thought of as a biological concept, or in other words, a matter of species. People believed that superior races (which was thought of as whites) produced superior cultures and that the intermixing of races resulted in a degradation of the “superior racial stock” (64). This employed an “essentialist” approach to identify race, which basically stated that race was a matter of innate characteristics where the color of skin and other physical properties provided the most flagrant and superficial indicators. Finally, at the ...

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was therefore to overcome these attitudes and achieve tolerance and acceptance of “brotherhood” and to pass laws that prohibited discrimination of all sorts. This way of thinking - noticing someone’s race but not acting upon that awareness - of being “color-blind” is called a “neoconservative” racial project (57). This was linked to the concept of the role of race in the social structure and how it can play no part in government action except to enforce the ideal.
This early definition seemed simple enough, but in the 1960’s, a major change in thinking occurred where riots about inequality erupted and showed that prejudice was an “unavoidable outcome of patterns of socialization which ...

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